Article By : EET ASIA

Taiwan's MOST cooperates with Techstars and Stanford University to spotlight on Taiwan’s proactive testing solutions to COVID-19...

While many countries are countering the pandemic of the coronavirus (COVID-19) on all fronts, Taiwan’s effective prevention measures have been highly recognized internationally.

Recently in an event called “COVID-19 Startup Weekend Global Challenge”, held by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and Techstars, invites C. Jason Wang, MD, PhD, the associate professor from Center for Policy Outcomes and Prevention at Stanford University, to talk with Taiwan’s Minister Dr. Chen Liang-Gee in a pre-training live streaming, and share Taiwan’s scientific and technological anti-epidemic experience.

Taiwan’s Sci-Tech anti-epidemic experience

“In 2004, the year after the SARS outbreak, the Taiwan government, MOST subsidized about 200-300 laboratories, cultivated more than 1,000 researchers, and built a key technology and anti-epidemic platform to fight against infectious viruses,” Chen says. “We subsidized the team from Academia Sinica to speed up the development of fast screening reagents, which can shorten the virus detection time to 15 minutes. We also assist startups like BluSense to develop a portable detection platform with a sensitivity of up to 90% in Danish clinical trials”.

At the same time, MOST also collects data such as scientific research, voice, medical information through NCHC Smart Bio-medicine Life Science Cloud, a data platform of Taiwan’s National Center for High-performance Computing of National Laboratory Research Institute, and integrates the diversified information created by AI innovation research centers, then place the data on the platform which is open for researchers and professionals to download and apply to their solution.

Associate professor of Stanford University, MD Jason Wang’s article of ”Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan, Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing”, published on “The Journal of the American Medical Association” in March this year to praise Taiwan’s epidemic prevention practices.

Wang said that after the SARS epidemic, Taiwanese government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC) to serve as a direct communication command point, and quickly formulated and implemented a list of 124 operational items, including border control from airports, using data for case identification and isolation, strengthening anti-counterfeit information and educating the public. Taiwan use its strength on science and Technology in managing the crisis can be seen to the world and it is a perfect reference for countries all over the world.

COVID-19 Startup Weekend Global Challenge

In order to enhance Taiwan’s global competitiveness of technological innovations, MOST integrates domestic entrepreneurial ecosystem resources and global accelerators such as Techstars, Sparklabs, IAPS and BE Capital, through its startup ecosystem building program, Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA). Among them, Techstars connect its partners in startup communities across 70 countries from all over the world to launch “Techstars Global Startup Weekend COVID-19”.

With 54 hours of continuous online competitions, each country selects its representatives on prototypes. There will be top 20 teams go into the global final round. Each team will get US$10,000 dollars reward, assistance from Techstars to explore global virus prevention market, and will have the possibility to obtain US $ 500,000 investment.